Iowa Caucus

At least those who bothered to show up at the byzantine Caucuses. On the GOP side Cruz wins with 28%, with Trump at 24% and Rubio a surprisingly close third at 23%. In fourth is Carson at 9%. The also rans are Rand Paul at 5%, Jeb Bush at 3%, Fiorina at 2%, Kasich at 2%, Christie at 2% and Santorum at 1%. For now the GOP race is a three man race and probably will remain so unless someone outside the triumvirate wins in New Hampshire. Minor candidates will begin to drop out, and Huckabee has already announced the suspension of his campaign.

On the Democrat side Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are effectively tied. Normally this would be terrible news for a front runner, but Clinton can console herself that a low budget insurgent candidate like Sanders needs an early win. If Clinton can eke out a victory here and do so again in New Hampshire, expect Sanders to quickly become a footnote in the Democrat campaign, unless some bigger names drop in. If Sanders beats Clinton in New Hampshire, she is wounded and will face a long, hard fight for the nomination, with the prospect of other candidates emerging down the road in the later primaries.

After a recount, the vote tally from the Iowa Caucuses show that Rick Santorum defeated Mitt Romney by a whopping 34 votes. Previously Romney had been declared the winner by eight votes.

In the grand scheme of thing, this means little. It doesn’t change the delegate vote one iota. It does mean that the talking point that Romney won both Iowa and New Hampshire needs to come to a halt. It is funny to read stories about this development suggesting that the Iowa caucuses were a split a decision, yet when Romney was considered to have won there was no such talk. He might as well have won by 8,000 votes judging by some of what was said in the aftermath.

I do note that there seems to be a lot of confusion about the vote tally.

The deadline for final certification of the results was Wednesday. Party officials said eight precincts failed to follow the rules and fill out the official forms on caucus night, meaning those results can never be certified, while other precincts turned in forms that didn’t meet the legal requirements.

And yet we continue to allow this state to have over-sized influence on the nomination process. Are we prepared to just ignore Iowa yet?

After finishing in fifth place in the Iowa caucus, Rick Perry delivered perhaps the finest speech of the night. At the end, he said that he was going home to Texas to “reassess” his campaign and try to find a way forward. That is not quite as dire as “suspending” one’s campaign, but that is not a good sign for those of us who support his candidacy.

I hope that Perry decides to continue, and not just because he’s my favorite candidate. I also don’t think that Michelle Bachmann should drop out. No candidate should drop out after last night, and for one simple reason: it is simply time to stop making one small caucus and one small state so important in the grand scheme of a campaign.

Tim Pawlenty dropped out after merely losing a non-binding straw poll in Ames. Pawlenty’s premature exit from the campaign is a decision that he must be ruing considering all that has transpired over the past five months. Perhaps Pawlenty would have dropped back into Jon Hunstman territory, or perhaps Pawlenty would have become the candidate that conservatives rallied around in order to defeat Mitt Romney. We simply don’t know because Pawlenty let the decision of a handful of voters in what is basically a glorified clambake take him out of the race.

You know how many delegates Santorum and Romney, the winners of the Iowa caucus, each won? Six. Six delegates out of 1,144 needed to win the nomination. Iowa’s population is roughly one percent of the total US population. It is a state that is over 90% white, and has an unemployment rate that is 5.7 percent, almost three full points below the national average. In other words, it is not a state that is exactly representative of the nation as a whole.

The first four state in the presidential primary season represent a decent cross-section of the population, or at least of the Republican electorate. Iowa is a populist, midwest, rural white state. New Hampshire is a small New England state that is typically more libertarian. South Carolina is a growing, southern state that has typically been more predictive of the eventual nominee than the first two states. Finally there is the populous swing state of Florida. We will have a much better idea of the state of the race after the Florida primary has been completed, and all the candidates owe it to the electorate to at least tough it out until that point or else we will continue to allow Iowa to have a ridiculously over-sized influence on the nomination process.

Now there are legitimate reasons for Perry (and for Bachmann) to see the writing on the wall and drop out. Perry concentrated his efforts on Iowa and spent north of $5 million there. After all that he only received 11 percent of the vote. Perry had already written off New Hampshire, and he is struggling to get even in the top three in South Carolina. He may see the rise of another respectable conservative in Santorum as a sign that he has no path to victory, and his continued presence in the race is only muddying the field. That’s an understandable strategic decision, and I respect that. But I hate to see Iowa continuing to play a more glorified role in the selection process than is merited.